Conference calls are used to enable a calling party to have more than one party partake in a call. Such a conference call may allow a called party to participate during the call, or the conference call may be established so that a called party merely listens into the call and cannot speak to the other parties.
Conferencing services are increasingly used in next generation networks. Multimedia conferences that can support several media types, such as video and “chat” type messaging, provide network service providers with new possibilities for providing innovative group communication services to customers.
Methods and protocols have been defined for signaling of multimedia conferences in Internet Protocol networks. However, there is no standard protocol for the creation and subsequent modification of a multimedia conference and its attributes (e.g. participants, time schedule, available media, etc).
Several conference control protocol (CCP) proposals have already been proposed for creating and modifying conferences on conference servers in IP networks. These proposals rely on complex conference control syntax and semantics to manipulate conference information, and are not widely supported by existing conference clients, especially mobile phones. Accordingly, they have not gathered real acceptance in the industry.